Beacon Broadside: A Project of Beacon Presstag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-14005452014-07-02T15:45:00-04:00Ideas, opinions, and personal essays from respected writers, thinkers, and activists. A project of Beacon Press, an independent publisher of progressive ideas since 1854.TypePadThe Civil Rights Act Turns 50: Essential Reading from Beacon Presstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301a3fd2a1ae1970b2014-07-02T15:45:00-04:002014-07-02T15:26:11-04:00To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, we've put together a list of essential books that we hope will inspire future generations to come together for progressive social change.Beacon Broadside

Martin Luther King, Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington

Fifty years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law. It was a culminating moment in the civil rights movement, a movement that, as author and legal scholar Sheryll Cashin noted in her recent New York Times editorial, far from being isolated to southern black activists, involved an extensive and well-coordinated “grass-roots mobilization [that] was multiracial, from the integrated legion of Freedom Riders, to the young activists in the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, to the more than 250,000 demonstrators in the March on Washington, a quarter of whom were white.” The story of the act’s eventual success is the story of our nation passing through a moral gauntlet. That, fifty years later, we remain uncertain about how best to address the legacy of those racial divisions that first sparked the movement is a testament to how deep the fissures ran. And how brave and dedicated the movement’s heroes were—Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Bob Moses, and others—men and women whose names have entered the lingua franca of American history, synonymous with freedom, righteousness, and moral certitude. As Dr. King says in his classic narrative Why We Can’t Wait, “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to work to be co-workers with God.”To celebrate their struggles, and the efforts of all those “co-workers with God” who sacrificed so much to lay the groundwork for the passing of the Civil Rights Act, we’ve put together a list of essential books that we hope will empower the next generation for another fifty years and beyond.

Often applauded as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most incisive and eloquent book, Why We Can’t Wait recounts the Birmingham campaign in vivid detail, while underscoring why 1963 was such a crucial year for the civil rights movement. During this time, Birmingham, Alabama, was perhaps the most racially segregated city in the United States, but the campaign launched by Fred Shuttlesworth, King, and others demonstrated to the world the power of nonviolent direct action. King examines the history of the civil rights struggle and the tasks that future generations must accomplish to bring about full equality. The book also includes the extraordinary “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which King wrote in April of 1963.

On August 28, 1963, over a quarter-million people-two-thirds black and one-third white-held the greatest civil rights demonstration ever. In this major reinterpretation of the Great Day—the peak of the movement—Charles Euchner brings back the tension and promise of the march. Building on countless interviews, archives, FBI files, and private recordings, this hour-by-hour account offers intimate glimpses into the lives of those key players and ordinary people who converged on the National Mall to fight for civil rights in the March on Washington.

2014 NAACP Image Award Winner: Outstanding Literary Work in Biography / Autobiography. Presenting a powerful corrective to the popular iconography of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who with a single act birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis excavates Parks’s political philosophy and six decades of political work to reveal a woman whose existence demonstrated-in her own words-a “life history of being rebellious.” From her family’s support of Marcus Garvey to her service with the NAACP in Alabama in the 1940s and 1950s, and from her courageous bus arrest and steadfast efforts on behalf of the Montgomery bus boycott to her work in Detroit challenging Northern racial inequality on behalf of a newly elected Congressman John Conyers and alongside Black Power advocates, Parks’s contributions to the civil rights movement go far beyond a single day.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s account of the first successful large-scale application of nonviolent resistance in America is comprehensive, revelatory, and intimate. King described his book as “the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.” It traces the phenomenal journey of a community, and shows how the twenty-six-year-old King, with his conviction for equality and nonviolence, helped transform the nation—and the world.

At a time when popular solutions to the educational plight of poor children of color are imposed from the outside-national standards, high-stakes tests, charismatic individual saviors-the acclaimed Algebra Project and its founder, Robert Moses, offer a vision of school reform based in the power of communities. Telling the story of this remarkable program, founded on the belief that math-science literacy is a prerequisite for full citizenship, Robert Moses draws on lessons from the 1960s Southern voter registration he famously helped organize: “Everyone said sharecroppers didn't want to vote. It wasn't until we got them demanding to vote that we got attention. Today, when kids are falling wholesale through the cracks, people say they don’t want to learn. We have to get the kids themselves to demand what everyone says they don’t want.”

Contextualizing JFK's Legacy, part 1tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa8833019b0171f112970b2013-11-22T10:59:00-05:002013-11-22T15:28:44-05:00In the first of two posts, we examine JFK's legacy in the struggle for civil rights, beginning with the power struggle for the integration of the Washington Redskins and ending with the 1963 March on Washington for Civil Rights and JFK's historic meeting with the leaders of the Civil Rights movement.Beacon Broadside

There is perhaps no modern President whose legacy resonates in the public consciousness as much as John F. Kennedy's. It was, in a sense, the first modern presidency: The first to be televised—from its historic inauguration to those shocking final moments in Dallas fifty years ago today—and the first to truly grapple with the maelstrom of social unrest that would lead eventually to the posthumous passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, just months after his death. In this first of two posts on JFK's legacy, we reach into some of our recent books for look at the Kennedy administration's complex and evolving relationship with race and the Civil Rights Movement, starting with the struggle between the Kennedy's Secretary of the Interior Stewart Lee Udall and Washington Redskins owner George Marshall over the integration of his team, and ending with an on-the-ground accounting of the 1963 March on Washington for Civil Rights, and JFK's meeting with the major civil rights leaders of the time.

The national capital was splashed by sun and heaped with snow during Kennedy’s inauguration. Udall had convinced JFK to invite Robert Frost to read a poem, but the sun’s glare caused the esteemed New England poet to stumble over the lines he had written for the occasion. But despite Frost’s “fumble” and the winter chill, the Kennedy inaugural was generally well received. Although more blacks were invited to participate in the festivities than ever before, some African Americans were disappointed that Kennedy had not invited Martin Luther King Jr. and had not mentioned civil rights in his inaugural address with its now-famous line “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

Many civil rights activists were also disappointed to learn that Kennedy did not plan to advance the cause of racial justice by asking Congress for more laws immediately. He would shun “the forward pass,” grumbled Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, in favor of surer gains through symbolic gestures and limited executive action. When an all-white Coast Guard squad paraded by during the inauguration, Kennedy voiced his displeasure over the absence of African Americans to his aide Richard Goodman. Once in office, he had Goodwin contact the commander of the Coast Guard with instructions to integrate the Coast Guard Academy, as well as future parade groups.

In his first few months in office, JFK appointed more than forty blacks to important federal positions. He also named the first African American, John B. Duncan, to the Board of Commissioners of the District of Columbia. To the dismay of blacks, though, he also named some white supremacists to the federal bench and failed to deliver promptly on a campaign promise to abolish discrimination in federally subsidized housing and to seek civil rights legislation ending discrimination in public places. In early March 1961, he issued an executive order creating the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, with the aim of ending discrimination in federal employment and federally contracted jobs.

Knowing that JFK and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were committed to ending racial discrimination in hiring, Udall, after consulting with Interior Department lawyers, decided to challenge the hiring practices of George Marshall. He decided to move against the Washington “Paleskins,” he later recalled, because he “had personal convictions about civil rights and considered it outrageous that the Redskins were the last team in the NFL to have a lily-white policy.” He did not discuss his proposed action with JFK beforehand because he “instinctively felt that JFK and RFK would applaud. To me, it was the kind of stance that was all on the plus side.” Besides, he knew that JFK was about to issue the executive order establishing the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and his action complied with the spirit of that executive order.

Instead of speaking with the president personally, Udall notified him of the proposed action against the Redskins in his “Weekly Report to the President.” (JFK detested meetings, preferring to communicate with his cabinet through memoranda.) On February 28, 1961, Udall wrote: “George Marshall of the Washington Redskins is the only segregationist hold-out in professional football. He refuses to hire Negro players even thought [sic] Dallas and Houston, Texas have already broken the color bar. The Interior Department owns the ground on which the new Washington Stadium is constructed, and we are investigating to ascertain whether a no-discrimination provision could be inserted in Marshall’s lease. Marshall is one of the few remaining Jim Crow symbols in American sports, and we believe such action would have a wide impact in the civil rights field.”

Udall understood that civil rights activists would welcome his bold move. But he did not accurately assess the national attention that it would receive, or that it would provoke a showdown with a combative sports owner who was described by one black newspaper as “a throwback to the racial savagery of the early twenties.” The eyes of Washington and the nation would be watching to see whether the White House or the Redskins would blink first.

The 1964 election was the specter haunting the White House. Kennedy owed his narrow victory in 1960 to the black vote. Cities with big black populations like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and St. Louis gave Kennedy big majorities that offset weaknesses in ruraland suburban areas. But Kennedy also won six states of the old Confederacy (and five of eleven electoral votes in Alabama).

But for all practical purposes, maneuvering to save the Southern vote ended when Kennedy gave his June 11 televised speech on race:

The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. . . .

We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives. It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the facts that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all. Those who do nothing are inviting shame, as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right, as well as reality.

That speech changed everything. Kennedy now stood firmly on the side of the movement. Events forced Kennedy’s hand. “They got scared,” said one politician. “All at once they saw a national situation out of control. You know as well as I that we could have martial law in one hundred cities all over the country.”

For weeks, Martin Luther King and his advisers debated whether to make President Kennedy or Congress the movement’s target. King resented Kennedy’s hesitance to embrace civil rights. But when the president proposed the most important civil rights bill since Reconstruction, King was jubilant. “He was really great,” King told Stanley Levison. Congress should be the target of protests.

Two days after submitting his bill, Kennedy hosted the leaders of the March on Washington and gamely asked them to call off the march. Protest in the streets, he said, could only serve to anger Congress and hurt the bill. “Mr. President, they’re already in the streets,” Phil Randolph said.

And so rather that resisting the march, President Kennedy embraced it.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Author of two books, Thomas G. Smithis a member of the history program at Nichols College. He lives in Dudley, Massachusetts, and is a fervent fan of the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Dodgers.

Charles Euchner is the author of books about politics, sports, and cities. He is the creator of The Writing Code, the only brain-based system for mastering writing and editing. He was executive director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard University.

Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington with Nobody Turn Me Aroundtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301901ec1090b970b2013-08-26T13:23:00-04:002013-09-03T13:49:26-04:00Read the stories behind a pivotal moment in American history.Beacon Broadside

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom happened fifty years ago this week. Most people don't know much about the day beyond a few snippets of one historic speech. But the full story is dramatic, compelling, and central to our understanding of how the civil rights movement shaped our history.

On August 28, 1963, over a quarter-million people—two-thirds black and one-third white—held the greatest civil rights demonstration ever. In this major reinterpretation of the Great Day—the peak of the movement—Charles Euchner brings back the tension and promise of the march. Building on countless interviews, archives, FBI files, and private recordings, this hour-by-hour account offers intimate glimpses into the lives of those key players and ordinary people who converged on the National Mall to fight for civil rights in the March on Washington.

Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washingtontag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa8833014e89d1004b970d2011-07-13T13:46:44-04:002011-07-13T13:48:03-04:00Now out in paperback: Charles Euchner's powerful history of one of our nation's most important moments. Beacon Broadside

On August 28, 1963, over a quarter-million people-two-thirds black and one-third white-held the greatest civil rights demonstration ever. In this major reinterpretation of the Great Day-the peak of the movement-Charles Euchner brings back the tension and promise of the march. Building on countless interviews, archives, FBI files, and private recordings, this hour-by-hour account offers intimate glimpses into the lives of those key players and ordinary people who converged on the National Mall to fight for civil rights in the March on Washington.

Righteous and Open For All To See: The Civil Rights Movement and FBI Informantstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa8833013487850f39970c2010-09-20T10:37:07-04:002010-09-20T10:37:07-04:00Charles Euchner discusses the recent revelation that an acclaimed photographer of the civil rights movement was an FBI informant.Beacon Broadside

Withers took some of the pictures that we remember most about that long-ago but still-present era when blacks struggled to break the back of a terrorist state and win their full rights as citizens. They marched and got beaten by mobs and cops. They signed up to vote and they lost their jobs and homes. They sang and they got thrown into jail. They spoke up and their churches and homes got shot at and burned.

Withers documented the trial in the Emmett Till case in 1955 and the planning for the Poor People's March in 1968. He took pictures of Martin Luther King marching, riding a bus in Montgomery after the boycott, relaxing behind closed doors before his death. He took the iconic picture of sanitation workers marching in Memphis, bearing the signs "I Am A Man," in the days before King's assassination. He recorded demonstrations all over. He took pictures of those quintessential American institutions, jazz and baseball, which gave expression to black aspirations even while holding blacks down.

And now, after combing documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and matching reports of an informant named in FBI files as ME 338-R with a memo matching Withers to that tag, the Commercial Appeal reveals that Withers gave the FBI hounds information that J. Edgar Hoover and his henchmen could use to disrupt the civil rights and peace movements. The period of Withers's activity is not clear; so far it looks like Withers worked for the FBI from 1968 to 1970.

The icons of the civil rights movement deserve to feel betrayed. They were battling a deadly enemy with little more than their bodies, minds, and souls. The FBI and its allies drew from the deep pockets of the federal government and private hatepreneurs. Withers's information could have resulted in dire consequences for the friends he named. Some might have lost jobs and homes, got hit with audits and smear campaigns, the whole COINTELPRO bag of tricks.

So what Ernest Withers did was wrong, a terrible betrayal of the people who loved him and brought them into the most intimate places and moments.

I got lots of files from the FBI, many recycled from previous FOIA requests. It was obvious that the FBI was getting its agents into all kinds of church meetings and activist groups. And of course the FBI was tapping the phones of major figures not just in civl rights but all over politics and the arts. Someone had to be sitting in those meetings and taking notes. Some of them had to blend in with the crowd.

And the people in the movement knew it. The civil rights activists of the day sometimes laughed about who was in the meeting to snitch. Sometimes they knew, sometimes they didn't. But as many told me, they didn't care. What they were doing was righteous and open for all to see. The element of surprise sometimes played a role, but careful planning and discipline were more important. When surprises happened, the leaders were often the most surprised of all. The "dash for freedom" in the Birmingham campaign is just one example.

A man named Julius Hobson, who was active in Washington politics, sat in all the meetings to arrange for security at the March on Washington. The minutes of these meetings show that Hobson was excited about the toys of the security detail. He talked constantly about walkie-talkies and command hierarchies. He wanted to be in the middle of it all, even though Bayard Rustin, the brilliant march organizer, had recruited and trained black cops from New York to keep the peace using nonviolent means. And the Washington police and federal security officers were involved too. Years later, after Hobson died, FBI documents showed that he too was an informant.

We won't ever know the full story of Ernest Withers either. Did he just need the money? Did he get framed? Did he want to rat on the Invaders, a Black Panther-style group on the rise in Memphis? Was he trying to deke the feds? Was he confused? Was he targeting enemies and promoting friends? Some of the above? All of the above?

The civil rights movement was the transcendent moment of our time. A vast community of people from all over -- ministers and housewives and students, factory workers and sharecroppers and garbage men, teachers and artists and the unemployed -- embraced a strategy of nonviolence and love to confront a vicious and corrupt system of racism. They won, not just for themselves but for all of us and all the world.

Part of what's so amazing -- and so profoundly moving -- is that they were just ordinary people. They were not superhuman. They were courageous but also scared. They made mistakes, lots of them. They got sloppy and sometimes selfish and even ornery. But they rose above their flaws and transformed a nation, and that's one of most beautiful things you can say. And no FBI file will ever change that.

Beck, King, and Nonviolencetag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa88330133f3610cc1970b2010-08-28T09:58:49-04:002010-08-28T09:58:49-04:00Charles Euchner looks at the dueling marches in Washington, both being held on the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech.Beacon Broadside

From the Washington Post's Political Bookworm Blog:

It’s not exactly a memorable anniversary year – not the 25th, or 50th, or 75th year since Martin Luther King’s memorable “I Have a Dream Speech.” It’s the 47th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington on Saturday, and this one may become memorable because in this highly charged election year, the day is being claimed from opposite sides of
the political spectrum. Charles Euchner has chronicled the actual day more than 40 years ago (and less than 50) in “Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington,” released this month by Beacon Press. Here, Euchner, who teaches writing at Yale University and is the author of eight books, reflects on the
competing commemorations taking place in Washington this weekend.

Euchner says of the 1963 March:

On that long-ago August afternoon, order prevailed. Americans
watching live TV coverage -- the first time anyone ever saw the movement
gather together -- witnessed a joyous but determined crowd. One
commentator likened it to a church picnic, but it was more than that.
With their numbers, marchers presented a “living petition.” Marchers
served notice, in King’s words, that they “can never be satisfied” until
gaining their full rights as citizens.

But marchers knew they had to avoid responding to violence with
violence -- or even returning the vitriol of their foes. When they were
attacked or slandered, they were taught to turn away. Only by focusing
on higher values -- universal values -- could they succeed.

Excerpt: Roy Wilkins’s Reluctant Tribute to W.E.B. Du Boistag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa88330134866f000b970c2010-08-24T12:47:11-04:002011-01-18T13:05:45-05:00In this excerpt from Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the March on Washington, the leaders of the March determine how to acknowledge the death of a leader in the movement for black civil rights. Beacon Broadside

Western Union had delivered hundreds of telegrams of congratulations to the March on Washington tent. One came from W. E. B. Du Bois.

"One thing alone I charge you, as you live, believe in Life!" Du Bois said in a final message composed two months before, during his final illness. "Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the Great End comes slowly, because time is long."

Then came the news that Du Bois had died the day before in Accra, Ghana, at the age of ninety-five. Maya Angelou led a group of Americans and Ghanaians to the U.S. embassy in Accra, carrying torches and placards reading "Down with American Apartheid" and "America, a White Man's Heaven and a Black Man's Hell."

In Washington, the news fluttered through the audience and onto the platform.

Over a seventy-year career, Du Bois took every conceivable approach to the race problem. He was a provocative propagandist and measured scholar. He was for integration and then for separation. He believed in the American dream and disdained it. He believed in the power of politics and the ambiguity of culture. He brawled and he stood aloof. He embraced indigenous liberation and global communism.

Du Bois wrote thirty-eight books on the experience of race—on slavery and reconstruction, rebellion and war, psychology and economics, America and Africa, war and democracy, ideology and crime. He wrote thousands of articles and reports. He debated Booker T. Washington and coined the expression "the talented tenth," to describe the vanguard that could lead the black race out of bondage. As an American facing the cruelty and degradation of Jim Crow, Du Bois embraced the pan-African ideal of a global race.

Lifetimes ago, in 1909, Du Bois helped create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He left the NAACP in 1948 when he was rebuked for holding a civil rights march in Washington. In 1961 he became a Communist Party member, renounced his American citizenship, and became a citizen of Ghana.

When Bayard Rustin got news of Du Bois's death, he worked his way across the crowded stage to deliver the news to Roy Wilkins. As the head of the NAACP, surely Wilkins would want to say a few words about this historic figure.

"I'm not going to get involved with that Communist at this meeting," Wilkins told Rustin. "I'm not going to announce that Communist's death."

So Rustin crossed back to confer with Phil Randolph. How to announce Du Bois's death?

"Tell Roy that if he doesn't announce it, I will."

Rustin crossed the stage again. He told Wilkins that Randolph was ready to speak.

"I don't want Phil Randolph doing it," Wilkins said.

But someone had to announce the death of the century's most enduring civil rights leader at the nation's greatest demonstration.

"Well, you tell Phil I'll do it," Wilkins said.

That was the ornery Roy Wilkins—the same Wilkins who had attempted to block Rustin's appointment as the organizer of the March on Washington. . . who insulted Martin Luther King at Medgar Evers's funeral . . . who complained bitterly about the attention given the younger activists in the Deep South . . . who poked John Lewis . . . who dismissed the possibility of change resulting from demonstrations.

But a sweeter Roy Wilkins also showed up that day. For a man who did not believe in the power of mass demonstrations—who believed that real progress happened when elites lobbied presidents and congressmen and filed lawsuits against carefully selected targets—Roy Wilkins was positively buoyant on the day of the march.

His whole life, Roy Wilkins had been determined to live within the system. The grandson of former slaves, Wilkins was raised by an aunt in Duluth after his mother died of tuberculosis and his father abandoned him. After studying sociology at the University of Minnesota, he took a job in Kansas City with the black newspaper the Call. "Kansas City ate my heart out," he said. "It was a Jim Crow town through and through. There were two school systems, bad housing, police brutality, bombings in Negro neighborhoods. Police were arresting white and Negro high school kids just for being together."

Early political victories forge political character. Wilkins's first victory came in 1930, when he joined the successful effort to defeat President Herbert Hoover's nomination of John J. Parker to the Supreme Court. A coalition of labor and civil rights organizations targeted Parker for his yellow-dog contracts and his opposition to black suffrage. Later that year, blacks cast the decisive votes to defeat Senator Henry Allen of Kansas, who supported Parker. "I was ecstatic," Wilkins said. "Here at last was a fighting organization, not a tame band of status-quo Negroes." Fighting, though, was confined to the formal arenas of politics. Like intellectuals of the period, including William Kornhauser and Jose Ortega y Gasset, Wilkins believed that Hitler had forever discredited mass politics. Besides, he said, protest didn't work. Even the protests in Birmingham and other cities, he said, "didn't influence a single vote by a congressman or senator . . . not a single one."

Wilkins moved to New York to write for the NAACP's magazine the Crisis before getting promoted to assistant to Walter White, the NAACP's executive secretary. Wilkins's efforts followed the contours of the movement— first he took on lynching, then school segregation, then public accommodations and voting rights. Brown v. Board of Education illustrated the NAACP's model of racial progress. The NAACP chipped away at the edifice of segregation—first gaining blacks admission to professional and graduate schools, where the idea of "separate but equal " was impossible to implement because of the complete absence of programs for blacks, and then moving on to universities. Only when the courts had embraced the idea of blacks and whites going to universities together did the Brown case move forward.

Tenacious, pragmatic, distrustful of radical approaches, Wilkins became the head of the NAACP in 1955. Wilkins helped create a black-owned bank to assist blacks in starting their own businesses and avoid reprisals for civil rights activism. He embraced the NAACP's emphasis on judicial and legislative strategies. But by the summer of 1963, he embraced direct action. On June 1, he was arrested for picketing a variety store in Jackson.

However mainstream in his approach, Wilkins maintained a hard line against segregation. "It's just poison and no matter whether you have a teaspoonful or you have a barrelful of it, it ain't no good," he said. "Self-segregation is worse than another kind because your own eyes ought to be wide open. Segregation ought to be seen for what it is. It is not, necessarily, the division of people according to color. It can . . . and it does take that [form] in America; it is a device for control, for isolation and control. . . . A segregated group can always be cut off, be deprived, be denied equality."

Now, standing before this integrated throng—tan and relaxed, wearing a royal blue overseas hat with the letters NAACP stitched in gold—he began to talk with "my people." He paused, smiled, looked out on the throng that extended down the Mall, out back under the trees by the snow fence, even up in the tree branches. He was in the mood to play.

"I want to thank you for coming here today," he said, like a friendly uncle, "because you have saved me from being a liar. I told them that you would be here. They didn't believe me . . . because you always make up your mind at the last minute. And you had me scared! But isn't it a great day? "

Laughter rippled across the Mall. Then Wilkins called for silence down the middle of the Mall. "I want everybody out here in the open to keep quiet, and then I want to hear a yell and a thunder from all those people who are out there under the trees. "

Suddenly, like magic, the crowd quieted.

And then he commanded the people on the edges of the Mall, sitting under the trees, to shout out. The Mall filled with cheers. And Wilkins laughed.

Wilkins suddenly reveled in mass politics. And humor leavened even his dead-serious points.

"We want freedom now! "

"We come here to petition our lawmakers to be as brave as our sit-ins, and our marchers, as daring as James Meredith, to be as unafraid as the nine children of Little Rock, and to be as forthright as the governor of North Carolina, and to be as dedicated as the archbishop of St. Louis.

"All over the land, especially in parts of the Deep South, we are beaten, jailed, pushed, and killed by law enforcement officers. The United States government can regulate the contents of a pill, but apparently has no power to prevent these abuses of citizens within its own borders."

He endorsed President Kennedy's civil rights legislation but insisted on strengthening it. "The president's proposals," he said, "represent so moderate an approach that if any part is weakened or eliminated, the remainder will be little more than sugar water. Indeed, the package needs strengthening. The president should join us in fighting for something more than pap."

After a day of somber and contentious rhetoric, Wilkins chose to be light. He turned toward Congress: "We commend Republicans, north and south, who have been working for this bill. We even salute those Democrats from the South who want to vote for it and don't dare. We say to these people, 'Give us a little time, and we'll emancipate you—get to the place where they can come to a civil rights rally too!"

Then he spoke about W. E. B. Du Bois: "Regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path, it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause. If you want to read something that applies to 1963 go back and get a volume of The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois, published in 1903."

Half a world away, Shirley Graham Du Bois, his widow, wept in appreciation.

"Now, my friends, you got religion today. Don't backslide tomorrow. Remember Luke's account of the warning that was given to us all. 'No man,' he wrote, 'having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.'"

From excerpts to interviews, blog posts to online forums… Here are just a few updates from this week.

Gail Dines, author of Pornland, appeared on CNN News and in the Boston Globe this week, discussing "gonzo" pornography's grip on the young minds of an entire generation. Dines was also mentioned in a recent article on the website Independent Woman which discussed how porn addiction can ruin a marriage.

Dylan Edwards, who is at work on a graphic book about genderqueers and FTM transsexuals, had his picture snapped at Comic-Con and is part of this great roundup of LGBT comics folks at the Prism Comics blog.